A thoroughly modern creative mind

By Talis Polis and Dimity Reed

GEORGE Tibbits, whose diverse talents and engaging character were subtle and complex in a life rich in creative, professional and personal achievements, has died of cancer in St Vincent's Hospital. He was 74.

His compositional works have an enduring existence as 45 music scores, all bar one having been performed by symphony orchestras or chamber groups.

These include five string quartets  to write four is seen as amazing by musicians, to write five as extraordinary  as recordings of performances, as published writings on architecture and architects, as research into the very beginnings of European settlement in Melbourne and into the spatial and built development of Melbourne University, and as entries in the Grove and Macquarie encyclopedias.

These achievements were summarised in the citation for a doctor of architecture (honoris causa) recently awarded by Melbourne University.

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In its general knowledge crossword puzzle, The Age has twice given George Richard Tibbits as the answer to a question about distinction in several fields  a rare feat.

The Tibbits were none too successful mining prospectors in Boulder, in Western Australia, and their son and his two sisters were born there. When his father returned from World War I, damaged in the unsaid ways understood silently by that generation, the family moved to Victoria to become dairy farmers on various small farms around Colac.

Young Tibbits attended Colac High School, where his success at sports  cricket, tennis and as a champion hurdler  would no doubt have mitigated, in the eyes of his peers, the oddity of his early creative and intellectual preoccupations. With the encouragement of one of his teachers, his love of music emerged and, at age 16, he wrote the Otway Ranges Symphony with no formal training in music.

He learned about musical orchestration by ordering scores from Melbourne to follow the records played on Dr A. E. Floyd's classical music radio program. Mozart's The Magic Flute made such an impression that he recently said he couldn't imagine at the time that such beauty could be captured on paper.

He left Colac High early to work in a bank for a couple of years, then did National Service before returning to school to qualify for university entrance. Graduating in architecture and town and regional planning, he worked in London and Melbourne before returning to Melbourne University where, for 28 years, he taught architectural history and established the urban studies program.

He was chairman of the department of architecture and building from 1977 to 1980, and was associate dean (research) from 1986 to 1989. In 1991, he was appointed conservation adviser to the university, and, following his retirement in 1995, he was appointed as a senior associate of the Australian Centre.

The list of some of Tibbits' formal roles in academia say nothing of the joy he bought to generations of students, of the minds, lives and careers he influenced. One student wrote last week: "George was an inspiration. Courteous, wise, well informed, engaging, decent and unpretentious, he made a deep impression on all of us as students "

His sophistication encouraged his students to engage more broadly in the cultural world, to go to the latest play at La Mama, to exhibitions and concerts, to explore the Melbourne Cemetery, and to read widely.

With a team of students, Tibbits initiated the first heritage conservation study, the Beechworth Historical Reconstruction Project, a meticulous study of that important gold field town that influenced all subsequent historic town assessments and their management in Australia and beyond.

Tibbits' composing habits were intriguing. He was known to jot down musical scraps on tram tickets and book marks, and wrote his scores in a glorious, minute calligraphy using the edge of an old bank book for the bar lines and note stems in his finely nibbed architectural pen.

Any temptation to pigeon-hole him as an introvert would have to reckon with a professional life spent at the lecturn, with being a movie actor in Brian Davies' Godard-influenced 1963 Pudding Thieves, with political activity opposing the former Housing Commission's efforts to destroy Melbourne's inner suburbs, with composition, university management and a zestful sporting life. He was a tennis player so accomplished that a gentleman watching him play in a recent seniors' competition said that he had not seen ground strokes executed with that degree of style "since before the war".

Tibbits' crucial involvement in opposing the Housing Commission's slum reclamation program was driven more by humanitarian than heritage concerns; he wished to allow a voice for the people who were to lose their houses. And it became another strand of political action woven into his music.

He recently recalled in program notes for a concert of his work how in 1969, while involved in the protest, he received a commission to write a piece for the Sydney Symphony, a choir and a soprano, Marilyn Richardson. "While puzzling over what to set for this commission I heard Vin Buckley on the radio reading the poems in his new and unpublished Golden Builders," he said. "The first lines struck home: 'The hammers of iron glow down Faraday/ Lygon and Drummond shift under their resonance'.

Buckley agreed to Tibbits setting his music to some of the poems, and as a result of his encounter with Golden Builders, Tibbits wrote a number of other protest works. Another was a setting of a long poem by Andrew Taylor on the environmental and spiritual disaster caused by pollution from a giant steel mill. Yet another, 1976, was a setting of a 1906 newspaper article describing "a searing massacre of Aborigines in Gippsland". That piece, an octet for wind called Battue, was performed in 1977.

Of the myriad strands in his make-up, Tibbits' modernity was part of his complexity. While a professional historian of architecture, a heritage expert and protector, he was unmistakably a modernist. He read, particularly the early 20th century Irish writers such as Joyce and Beckett, with immense relish and great appreciation of their departures from established modes.

His earlier compositions were unapologetically atonal, and while he never lost his deep admiration and love for Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner, he could be scathingly dismissive of claims that more sentimental music, say Italian opera, had the merit of solace.

But above all, there was the marriage to Di that was a great love affair for 42 years, which produced three children, Lucy, Josquin and Amalie, and six grandchildren. They survive him.

Talis Polis and Dimity Reed, friends of George Tibbits, were assisted by his family, colleagues and former students.